New Ukrainian president will be elected for 5-year term - court
KYIV. May 16 (Interfax) - The Constitutional Court of Ukraine has ruled that the country's president to be elected during the early election on May 25 will serve a full five-year term in office.
"The president is being elected for a five-year term, whether the election is early or scheduled," according to the court resolution published on Friday.
The Constitutional Court said that clause 16 section 15 of the "Transition provisions" of the Ukrainian Constitution, whereby the next presidential election is due to be held in the last week of March 2015, was amended to allow a specific situation that arose following the changes to the Constitution regarding the legal regulation of a presidential election and the need to set the date for the next regular presidential election.
"The analysis of the provisions of this clause gives reasons to conclude that they only set the date for the next regular presidential election and that these provisions do not extend to the legal relations regarding an early election of the head of state," the court said in the resolution.
Thus, holding an early presidential election before the last week of March 2015 "makes it impossible to apply clause 16 section 15 of the 'Transition provisions' of the Constitution since its provisions lose the functional purpose and interrelation with the provisions of part one and part five of Article 103 of the Constitution defining that the Ukrainian president is elected for a five-year term."
Commenting on the court resolution, the head of the parliamentary committee for state-building and local self-administration, independent David Zhvaniya said that it makes any further speculation on the subject impossible.
"Given the very high price of these elections, and to prevent any speculation, the 101 deputies, including myself, appealed the Constitutional Court. The election is due next week, and it is important that the Constitutional Court has already given its decision," he said after the court issued its resolution
In late April 101 parliamentarians, including the UDAR Party faction leader, Vitali Klitschko, asked the Constitutional Court to give a formal interpretation of part one and part five in Article 103 of the Ukrainian Constitution in systemic relation to Clause 16 Section XV "Transition provisions" of the Fundamental Law, i.e. whether the provision envisaging a presidential election in March 2015 will be valid.